27 years ago, San Francisco newspapers were unveiling a unique facility to enable readers to consume their morning poison over a computer. It took two hours for an entire newspaper’s contents to be downloaded, minus pictures, advertisements and graphics. And five dollars per hour for telephone time, newscasters were saying the demise of the newspaper…
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Eight trends in Indian magazine publishing
Anurag Batra, chairman and editor-in-chief of exchange4media group, in Magazine World, the journal of The International Federation of the Periodical Press: 01) English language publishing has disproportionate advertising revenues in regard to its readership in comparison to Indian language publications. 02) India is a low cover-price market, and the dominant revenue stream is advertising. The…
Journalist declining national award is news
The following news item appears on the nation pages of The Times of India today: Journalist says no to Padma award Journalist P. Sainath, whose coverage of the agrarian crisis brought the prime minister to Vidarbha, has declined to be listed for a Padma award this year. Also read: Why Rajdeep, Barkha must decline Padma…
If you’re working hard to put food on your family
Third highest civilian honour for Shekhar Gupta
Only one full-time, working journalist has found a place in India’s Republic Day honours list for 2009. Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief of The Indian Express and host of NDTV’s interview programme Walk the Talk, has been decorated with the nation’s third highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan. Two others, veteran broadcaster Ameen Sayani and Nai Dunia…
Bajrang Dal singles out NDTV for pub coverage
Mangalore, on India’s west coast, has seen individual and institutional freedoms being transgressed since the BJP government took over in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. A legislator’s wife disappeared and committed suicide under a hail of speculation. Churches, convents, and prayer halls have been attacked. Buses carrying students of a co-education college have been…
An all-expenses-paid African safari with NYT
For the third year in a row, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is offering journalism students an all-expenses-paid vacation to travel with him to Africa to bring “fresh eyes” on the problems and solutions of global poverty. And to bring back stories that will appeal to younger readers. “This won’t be a day on…
How global media covered Obama inauguration
“Over two days, newspapers around the world published 1.2 million articles. Over one 24-hour period, the global radio and television coverage combined added up to 20 million minutes; to watch it all it would have taken a human being 38 years,” reports Richard Gizbert of Al Jazeera English on the inauguration of Barack Obama as…
Laughter is best medicine if you can swallow it
Indian politicians have a tremendous sense of humour, compared to Indian film, sport, business and other celebrities who believe the media’s job is, well, advertising. They have an under-appreciated ability to take criticism on their chin and laugh it off, although states like Maharashtra have proved an exception in recent times. But will former Indian…
Vir Sanghvi lashes out at Mint “censorship”
It’s all happening at Mint, the business daily launched by the Hindustan Times barely two years ago. Founder-editor Raju Narisetti left under a cloud of rumours at the turn of the year. And now, star-columnist Vir Sanghvi, a former editor of HT, has ended his column in Lounge, the Saturday magazine of Mint, with a…
World Association of Newspapers congress put off
The annual congress of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), scheduled to be held in recession-hit, scam-hit Hyderabad in March this year, has been put off to the end of the year. According to one report, the meeting was postponed to due to low registration. “The economic crisis has had a devastating effect on participation…
Maya Kamath Memorial Awards for Cartoonists
PRESS RELEASE: The Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Cartoonists is inviting applications for the first Maya Kamath memorial awards for cartoonists. There are four prizes on offer: three for the best political cartoons of 2008, and a special prize for the best budding cartoonist. The contest is open to cartoonists in English and other regional Indian…
Why journalists like Barack Hussein Obama
In his last press conference in Baghdad, George W. Bush received a pair of size 10s from a member of the press corps. But why does his successor seem to get a ’10’ from most journos? “Journalists like Obama because he’s the ultimate America success story, photogenic and has that perfect family. And because he…
‘Time for the old rules of journalism to change’
“Objectivity” is the mirage that modern journalism chases, although as a wise sage said eons ago: “The point-of-view that you should not have a point-of-view is itself a point-of-view.” On online journalism review, Robert Niles hits the nail on the head. Traditional journalism’s ethics and tenets, he says, are due for change in the more…
Messy desks, and items # 22 and # 69
The runaway success of Stuff White People Like has spawned plenty of imitations, including Stuff Asians Like. So, it was just a matter of time before somebody came up with Stuff Journalists Like. Let the whole world know that, besides messy work stations, we like: #3 Free Food #9 Coffee #10 Drinking # 14 Bylines…
India opens another door for FDI in papers, mags
Eighteen years after the liberalisation process began in India, and just months before the general elections, the Congress-led government has decided to allow 100 per cent foreign direct investment in facsimile editions of foreign newspapers. Simultaneously, 26% FDI has been allowed in Indian editions of foreign magazines. The following is the full text of the…
SRI LANKA, THE KILLING FIELDS OF JOURNALISTS
Lasantha Wickrematunge, the editor of the Sri Lankan weekly newspaper The Sunday Leader, was killed in Colombo last Thursday, 8 January 2009. As he was driving to work, four assassins on motorcycles stopped his car, smashed its windows with crowbars, and attacked him with sharp objects. The Paris-based media watchdog Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF) blamed…
Coffee Day is right: a lot can happen over coffee
Look, what a cartoon strip can do! The federation of coffee growers in Colombia is planning to sue Pulitzer Prize-winning American cartoonist Mike Peters for at least $20 million over this Mother Goose and Grimm strip, which they say damages the reputation of Colombia coffee by associating it and its symbol “Juan Valdez” with organised…
Indian media is large & vibrant, but how free is it?
BHAMY V. SHENOY writes from Houston, Texas: Every newspaper reader in India should be shocked at the way B. V. Seetharam, the publisher and editor of the Kannada daily Karavali Ale, is being repeatedly harassed by a democratically elected government in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. According to this version, Seetharam was arrested last…
Hero survives cost-cutting, jobs freeze, pay cuts
Tintin, the boy-faced Belgian reporter turns 80 years old today, 10 January 2009. It was on this day that Herge‘s comic-book hero made his appearance in the church newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, in which he visits Russia (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets) to describe the horrors of Bolshevism. Tintin held the ultimate job…
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